Table of Contents Introduction
The Problem
The Method
The Fear
The Beauty Notes
BibliographyIntroduction
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche wrote that even the great heroes of antiquity would be unfit to unfasten his Zarathustra's sandals(1). Thomas Mann, on the other hand, believed that Zarathustra was often "an unman hovering on the border of the ridiculous"(2). I do not know whose opinion is less reasonable. Nevertheless, Thus Spoke Zarathustra has been for me the beginning and foundation of my intellectual life.The Problem
In the Prologue to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra declares, "Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman--a rope over an abyss"(3). Man is the rope; men, tightrope dancers, are to dare to cross the abyss and realize their potentials or fall. Zarathustra, Nietzsche's ego-ideal, is to show them the way and thereby mend the rift between good and evil opened by the Persian prophet Zoroaster. The rest of the book is an epic poem of Zarathustra's encounters with the idols and demons of nineteenth century social thought. Underlying Zarathustra's teachings as the book progresses is his own coming to full consciousness, culminating in his affirmation of life in the face of "eternal recurrence." As a radical critic of bourgeois values, Nietzsche (as Zarathustra) assumes that men are not what they could be. As a psychologist, an individualist, and an elitist, he proposes that great men must transform themselves before society can become healthy and vital. On the question of whether society as a whole can ever improve itself, Nietzsche is ambiguous. He criticizes the masses and goads them upwards, but goes on to view them as merely the ground from which "the artist, the philosopher, and the saint" can spring. We will leave the question of social change till the end and talk mainly in this paper of how the extraordinary individual can transform himself. In reality, the two poles cannot be so easily separated. Zarathustra says, "Verily (wahrlich), my friends, I walk among men as among the fragments and limbs of men. This is what is terrible for my eyes, that I find man in ruins and scattered as over a battlefield or a butcher-field"(4). Nietzsche's biography is reflected in his philosophy: perhaps we can attribute many of the terrible tensions felt by Nietzsche and expressed in Zarathustra to Nietzsche's idea that the few can, so to speak, overcome themselves and leave the many behind. The assumption upon which education, as opposed to mere socialization, is based is that men have unrealized potentials which can be liberated. Nietzsche sees this as the distinguishing characteristic of man, that he is alienated from the world. "The earth", says Zarathustra, "has a skin, and this skin has diseases. One of these diseases is called 'man'"(5). Nietzsche is speaking of man in society, and he assumes that there are possibilities beyond this poor repressed creature. Zarathustra says, "The world is deep - and deeper than day had ever been aware"(6) and "the heart of the earth is of gold"(7). As we shall see later, Nietzsche will at times talk interchangeably of the world and of the whole man, because the world is for him a "self" as much as is the body-self. But why is it that man is less than he could be? Let us leave Nietzsche for the moment, and talk about aspects of consciousness. Consciousness is usually seen as resulting from the withdrawal of projections from the world. The "primitive mind" is apparently one in which the world of nature is understood in dramatic, human images, and is mythologized. This kind of symbolization of reality does not notably alienate men from nature; they see themselves in nature as part of a living whole. But when social groups attempted more and more to manipulate the environment, a different kind of symbolic function came into being. Symbols had to become static rather than dynamic, and their inter-relations had to mirror the structure of technology rather than the inherent structure of the mind. By virtue of learning to say "I do 'x' to the world," man lost his magical ability to be one with the world. Carl Jung says of consciousness, "If one reflects upon what consciousness really is, one is deeply impressed by the extremely wonderful fact that an event which occurs within the cosmos produces simultaneously an inner image; thus it also occurs within, so to speak: in other words, it becomes conscious"(8). His statement might be faulted, for he seems to imply that the mind does no more than reproduce "outer events" in microcosm. But his statement does illustrate the split which has developed in our thinking between the "inner" and the "outer." This split underlies many other dualities. If we take, for example, the conception that evil is using others as means rather than ends, we find that our ability to manipulate symbols and thereby reality is the basis of our ability to do evil. "Once the fissure into self and ego, inner and outer, good and bad occurs, all else is an infernal dance of false dualities"(9). It is argued that consciousness is a symbolizing process of the mind which comes about when projections are withdrawn from the environment in order to manipulate it. As such, it represents man's differentiation of himself from his environment and from other men. We are left with the more difficult task of describing the nature of the "unconscious." It is, however, impossible to formulate any precise concept of the unconscious by virtue of its being, by definition, not a conscious phenomenon. "Freud states repeatedly that, in the last analysis, the 'real' nature of the unconscious process is a 'shrouded secret', 'unknowable'; it is...'something... of which we are totally unable to form a conception'"(10). Freud approached the problem by analyzing the manifestations of the unconscious in behavior, and in such phenomena as dreams and memories, Poets such as Baudelaire have captured the sense of the existence of the unconscious and the nature of the experiences it produces: "When to a cherished cat my gaze Is magnet-drawn and then returns Back to itself, it there discerns, With strange excitement and amaze, Deep down in my own self, the rays Of living opals, torch-like gleams And pallid fire of eyes, it seems That fixedly return my gaze"(11). If consciousness represents man's potential for autonomy, perhaps we can say that the unconscious represents his potential for relatedness. By this I mean that the unconscious is that part of the self which in some sense "understands" the interrelations of the self with its environment, including other selves. Because most of behavior and thought is forced into the more restricted mold of consciousness, we can see the unconscious as representing potential energy for the self, but energy which can only be liberated if the unconscious is integrated somehow with our conscious understanding. The problem, then, and one with which Nietzsche dealt in Zarathustra, is to bring our whole selves into consciousness, or rather to integrate our consciousness and the unconscious. A first step might be to develop an understanding of how we are related to our environment and how we are autonomous persons. Freud's theoretical compartmentalization of the mind into id, ego, and super-ego is a useful tool for describing all kinds of behavior in similar terms, but I think it creates certain misunderstandings. Freud himself was no victim of the "hidden reality fallacy" of which Fingarette speaks, but his interpreters sometimes assume that the unconscious "segment" of the mind is much like the conscious, only hidden or repressed from view. Thus, they fail to appreciate the possibilities for radically new kinds of experience based on the discovery of qualitatively different aspects of the mind. Secondly, a mechanistic or perhaps hydraulic model of the mind is unsatisfactory because it does not deal with experience in its primary terms, that is, experience as a continual and unified phenomenon rooted in the body and, in turn, in the environment. If "theory is the articulated vision of experience"(12), a theory whose elements are terms corresponding to concrete aspects of experience (e.g. "perception or "body" rather than "super-ego" or "secondary process") might be more satisfactory than one with very abstract primary terms. A major difficulty and confusion in developing any personality theory is the question of the "inner" and the "outer." We have touched on it above, but in the next section I will use Zarathustra to more precisely illustrate the distinction.The Method
Our intuition is that our "selves", that which we mean when we say "I", lie somewhere within our bodies, or perhaps correspond with our bodies. The "ego" of consciousness we usually feel to be within our bodies, looking out upon the "outside" world. That which links the "inner" self with the "outer" world is felt to be our five senses and the mentation function which coordinates and interprets them. The Buddhist doctrine of enlightenment, according to Fingarette, is that "What we have to do is to so purify the mind that the six aspects of consciousness (sight,sound, smell, taste, touch, mentation) in passing through their six sense-gates will neither be defiled by nor attached to their six sense-objects"(12) Here a "self" is assumed which lies behind even the mentating ego, a self which can and should be experienced directly. Nietzsche suggests the same conception, when Zarathustra says, "Instruments and toys are sense and spirit; behind them still lies the self. The self also seeks with the eyes of the senses; it also listens with the ears of the spirit"(13). However, when we try to understand dreams or even reflection by this model of the "little man" behind the senses peering out at the world through them, the model breaks down. Again, we understand more clearly if we do not fragment our model into discrete abstract elements; if we do, we are conceptualizing only the processes of our conscious ego and not those of our whole self. Quentin Lauer describes the phenomenologist's idea of consciousness as "the kind of being an object of knowledge has in being known"(14), and this conception seems to be a more useful one. First, it enables us to understand perceiver, perception, and perceived as an inseparable organic unity. Second, we can see how both conscious and unconscious mental processes can enter into determining the nature of our experience. Finally, the implication is that we can endow the world and thereby ourselves with a different kind of being (that is, Being) if we can "know" its objects with our whole selves. We can become conscious of our (so far) unconscious energies based on our rootedness in the "outer" world, this through "knowing" the outer world fully and openly rather than schematically and "objectively." Nietzsche knew that we can discover our selves by discovering and "knowing" the world. At one point, "Zarathustra looked into the woods and the silence; amazed, he looked into himself"(15). Throughout Zarathustra as throughout all poetry, the "inner" and the "outer" are in effect interchangeable: external events are psychic events, and vice versa. More precisely, Nietzsche is writing of the "inner" world; the "outer" world is the world of objective and reified experience, "conscious" experience in the narrow sense. "Perception, imagination, fantasy, reverie, dreams, memory are simply different 'modalities of experience,' none more 'inner' or 'outer' than any other.... The 'inner' then, is our personal idiom of experiencing our bodies, other people, the animate and inanimate world"(16). In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche repeatedly stresses the importance of sensory experience in "self-overcoming." "Do I counsel you to slay your senses?" asks Zarathustra. "I counsel the innocence of the senses"(17). "Wake and listen, you that are lonely! From the future come winds with secret wing-beats; and good tidings are proclaimed to delicate ears"(18). Nietzsche felt that through his openness to nature, the overman discovers the tremendous energies of his unconscious. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche finds meaningful metaphors for psychic phenomena in all of nature. Zarathustra moves from high mountains to deep valleys, crosses bridges over gaping abysses, meets with his animals and his disciples in a cave, wanders up rocky paths and across scorched deserts: the features of the geography all suggest psychological attitudes toward the world, much as in dramatic backdrops. Weather too is personalized; Zarathustra moves sometimes under a dark cloud, sometimes under the burning sun, sometimes over icy wastelands. Natural cycles such as that of the seasons and of night and day are also used to create a corresponding inner attitude. The metaphors are not all visual; for example, the sounds of animals, birds, and storms are experienced by Zarathustra as highly personal, almost as guideposts in his movement to consciousness. Zarathustra is an allegory which teaches that man discovers himself in nature. The assumption behind allegory and parable is not that man is a scientist who objectifies and manipulates his environment, but rather that man is an organic part of the world who is educated directly by the events which touch him. Zarathustra says, "Watch for every hour, my brothers, in which your spirit wants to speak in parables: there lies the origin of your virtue. There your body is elevated and resurrected; with its rapture it delights the spirit so that it turns creator and esteemer and lover and benefactor of all things"(19). We have been developing without explicitly stating a kind of dual conception to correct the "common sense" notion of "inner" and "outer" as divided by the surface of the body. To be sure, the body exists, and can be thought of as a form of real and natural property. Ordinarily, we control our bodies, and need not appropriate our bodies from collective "possessions", as is the case with other property. One very natural conception of the self is that of my self as my body. When we appreciate that, biologically at least, our "minds" (nervous systems) coincide with our bodies, the conception of the body-self is even more appealing. But by virtue of our senses, and the conscious and unconscious aspects of our minds as I have presented them, we are led to a second conception of the self as world. "World" in this case is all the reality that we know, that we perceive, that we remember, that we dream, that we inherit. An interpreter of Hegel writes, "To be fully conscious of self is to be fully conscious of all reality, since the ultimate self is all reality"(20). This "ultimate self" that we vaguely intuit, omniscient and therefore omnipotent, is what we mean by God. And perhaps Nietzsche, when he proclaimed that "God is dead," meant that men by misunderstanding their potential relation to the world have divorced themselves from their unconscious natures and have thrown away a source of mystery and depth in life. His remedy was to ask the overman to rediscover himself and the world, that is, to rediscover God. But how does one "rediscover the world" through sensory perception? One must do more than simply "see the world," "hear the world," and so on. Nietzsche wanted the senses to be "integrated", and this is a prerequisite for all creativity. Our five or six senses are but partial and incomplete perspectives on the same reality. Between our visual, our audial, and our tactile perceptions of the same object are huge "spaces," so to speak. The task of creative thought is perhaps to guess and suggest the continuous Being we experience from the discontinuous perspectives of each sense organ. Zarathustra asks, "Must one smash their ears before they learn to listen with their eyes?"(21) The overlapping and integration of sensory experience is a characteristic of all forms of art. Nietzsche in fact said of Zarathustra, "Perhaps the whole of Zarathustra may be classified as music - I am sure that one of the conditions of its production was a renaissance in me of the art of hearing"(22). He felt that it is important to develop and integrate all the senses; one of the parables in Zarathustra mocks a "tremendous ear attached to a small, thin stalk...a genius...an inverse cripple who had too little of everything and too much of one thing"(23). Allegory bridges the gap between the body-self and the world-self. But we can tentatively move further than this and say that all symbolization serves this function. That is, all aesthetic symbolization has both a conscious and an unconscious aspect. Language just as music can work to reintroduce man to the world. Nietzsche adumbrates the Biblical "Let there be light" when he writes, "For in darkness...the words and word-shrines of all being open up before me: here all being wishes to become word, all becoming wishes to learn from me how to speak"(24). He has Zarathustra proclaim: "Have not names and sounds been given to things that man might find things refreshing? Speaking is a beautiful folly: with that man dances over all things. How lovely is all talking, and all the deception of sounds! With sounds our love dances on many-hued rainbows"(25).The Fear
In the next two sections I wish to talk about the ups and downs of self-discovery. At one extreme is enlightenment, at the other, madness. The problem I have chosen to discuss in this paper isn't merely an abstract one: bringing the unconscious into awareness involves living and changing; Nietzsche's continual references to the "abyss" (die Tiefe) are autobiographical rather than stylistic. Freud spoke of Eros and Thanatos, and suggested that existence is literally a life-and-death struggle. Through identifying only with the schematic, conscious aspect of our minds, it is possible to avoid facing the dangers of knowing ourselves. Brecht: "I fled from the tigers. I fled from the fleas. What got me at last? Mediocrities." Nietzsche seems to say that all possibilities for human greatness in life, and indeed for true human happiness, stem from the willingness and courage to face the unknown, in this case to know the unconscious. Zarathustra says, "One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves"(26). Our conscious awareness organizes and simplifies our perceptions in order to derive meaning from them, and the ground rules for the building of this system are imposed by society. Insofar as one "shakes loose" from the restrictive controls of society, he faces what Fingarette calls 'ego-disintegration." Fingarette says that this is the same as anxiety: "I hold that anxiety is the other face of ego. It is not primarily an affect, one among many affects, which the ego must master; rather, it is ego-disintegration"(27). I would add that the fear of "ego-disintegration" is the same as the fear of dying. If this is true, the broadening of our consciousness to include our unconscious knowledge would make dying simply the termination of our individual selves, rather than something to be awaited in anxious terror. The fact remains that we fear to lose the conscious systems which sustain us and seem to solidly ground our thinking. "Do you know the fright of him who falls asleep?" asks Zarathustra. "He is frightened down to his very toes because the ground gives under him and the dream begins"(28). In other words, we experience Laing's "ontological insecurity" when the unconscious aspects of our minds begin to make themselves felt. Nietzsche believed that it is neither the unconscious nor the conscious functions of the mind in themselves which hold the terrors which the overman must face, but rather that the disjunction between the two is fearful. He writes, "Not the height but the precipice is terrible. That precipice where the glance plunges down and the hand reaches up. There the heart becomes giddy confronted with its double will"(29). But the integration of the conscious and the unconscious, of light and dark, must occur if our experience is to be liberated. Our conscious awareness allows us to function autonomously, but this autonomy is only isolation unless we open ourselves to the world. Freud and his successors often theorize about the "return of the repressed" to consciousness. Nietzsche, who preceded Freud, dealt in Zarathustra with the same phenomenon. Says Zarathustra: "My past burst its tombs; many a pain that had been buried alive awoke, having merely slept, hidden in burial shrouds"(30). Thus, "ego-disintegration" is evidently not just amorphous anxiety, but a restructuring of the mind into "new" patterns, sometimes into the patterns of old fears. It is paradoxical that one might "advance"in consciousness by returning, at least temporarily, to previous perspectives, but this is precisely the discovery of psychoanalysis. When the static structures of a restrictive consciousness break down, life becomes less automatic and more difficult, but this difficulty is the price that we pay for the opening of new possibilities. "Is not everything in flux now?" asks Zarathustra. "Have not all railings and bridges fallen into the water"(31). One of the new possibilities is madness, which I cannot attempt here to define. Laing seems to come close to providing a suggestion of its nature; he says, "When a person goes mad, a profound transposition of his place in relation to all domains of being occurs. His center of experience moves from ego to self. Mundane time becomes merely anecdotal, only the eternal matters. The madman is, however confused, He muddles ego with self, inner with outer, natural and supernatural"(32). The important thing to note here is that the experience of madness is not the experience of meaninglessness. Rather, it is the experience of the breakdown of old meaning schemes by new experience and the subsequent confused attempt to understand the new in old ways. But if, for example, we are not free, it is improbable that we could understand our first experiences of freedom in the old terms of our unfreedom. Similarly, if our consciousness is to broaden, we cannot expect to understand our "greater" or new selves in the terms of our "lesser" or old selves. At the very root of the meaning of Nietzsche's "self-overcoming" is the idea that we must venture into the unknown! Kafka's traveller says, "the journey is so long that I must die of hunger if I don't get anything on the way. No provisions can save me"(33). Nietzsche's interpreters make much of his "will to power." But they often take this concept out of its context. Nietzsche is not talking about the authoritarian personality who, through his objectification and manipulation of his environment, controls and "overpowers" it. Rather, he is speaking of will as that mysterious faculty through which the individual affirms his autonomy, even as he is open to the world. "Possession" by the unconscious is fearful because it forbodes dying itself: the individual is tempted to renounce his separation from the environment, and discard the limits of his body-self. Once one begins to renounce the static patterns of an alienated consciousness, a continual willing becomes a necessity for survival itself. But the individual, now conscious, is also free. "Willing liberates: that is the true teaching of will and liberty - thus Zarathustra teaches it"(34). We have seen some of the fears involved in self-realization as the individual discovers the world and himself. But "the world" is of course not only the realm of nature; there is also the social realm. Nietzsche was never able to resolve the problem of how the individual open to the world is able to live in a repressive society that is subtly or openly violent. Nietzsche comes to adopt intense suffering as a necessity and even a moral virtue, and his life ends in insanity. Janko Lavrin reads in Nietzsche "the history of a personal Golgotha up to the very moment of self-crucifixion." But unlike Christ, Nietzsche sometimes seems to distort his philosophy into a bitter polemic against the "rabble," and from these tendencies the fascists gleaned their "validation." What Nietzsche wrote of the petty bourgeoisie a century ago might be written today by many radicals: "What you have done to me is more evil than any murder of human beings; you have taken from me the irretrievable: thus I speak to you, my enemies. For you murdered the visions and dearest wonders of my youth"(36). The danger of fascism is a real one for the overman, for he has power over lesser men ("it rings in their ears like praise when somebody talks straight to all things")(37) but is utterly lonely because of the differences from them. In the context of psychotherapy, the psychiatrist Gitelson wrote, "The sense that one is in tune' with the patient may be a mark of empathy. But one must be cautious as to what is the subjective reality represented by such 'liking' and 'resonance.' Narcissistic identification and narcissistic infatuation may also produce 'resonance' feelings"(38). In his desire to feel a sense of "community" with other men, the overman may lead or join a totalitarian movement. Perhaps we can say that unconscious energies, the feelings of relation with the world, can be discovered in a mechanical order of society as well as in the harmony of nature. When this happens, one is much like the madman who imposes his old meaning schemes on new kinds of experience.The Beauty
We have just seen some of the ways in which self- realization can be a fearful experience, Dostoyevsky's "underground mann tells us, "I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness - a real thoroughgoing illness"(39). Dostoyevsky's underground man "knows himself," but this knowledge does not transform him or set him free. But he understands himself insofar as he understands society (and vice versa); unlike Zarathustra, he is not open to nature. One of the most far-reaching differences between the self-knowledge we gain from society and that we gain from nature lies in our understanding of time. Society, as the expression of technology (or the projection of ego) depends on thought rooted in linear time. The effect of natural cycles on our thought and behavior is minimized by technology, which is itself based on linear principles of cause and effect. We cannot understand Nietzsche's "myth of eternal recurrence" because it breaks free of these linear assumptions about time. Zarathustra's final acceptance of eternal recurrence is the climax of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and in fact the main stimulus for Nietzsche to write the book was a sudden insight (or revelation) about eternal recurrence. We may move toward a better understanding of time if we listen to Kafka's discussion of Paradise: "The expulsion from Paradise is in its main significance eternal: consequently the expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in this world irrevocable, but the eternal nature of the occurrence (or, temporally expressed, the eternal recapitulation of the occurrence) makes it nevertheless possible that not only could we live continuously in Paradise, but that we are continuously there in actual fact, whether we know it here or not"(40). All of this becomes a little clearer if we cease trying to understand time as we have learned to from our clocks. Time is not "outside" of us, and it is not the passing of "minutes," one after another, forever. Rather, time is for humans an all-encompassing mode of the mind for organizing reality. Fingarette writes. "The Self...is not in phenomenal time, the 'subjective' time-order; it is a source of the order of (subjective) time"(41). When we experience the unconscious, in dreams or perhaps psychosis, we realize that the time-order, like every other order of the mind, can become confused or seem to disappear entirely. The concept of "timelessness" often appears in mystical thought, and perhaps expresses the way that time is experienced by one who has incorporated his unconscious potentials for relatedness into his self. Fingarette says, "Time, for the enlightened one, becomes light, indeed transparent; for the unenlightened it is often confused, always a burden"(42). Nietzsche writes that the "gateway...'Moment'" lies between the two eternities that "contradict each other eternally"(43), and perhaps he would describe the fall from paradise as man's loss of his ability to apprehend the Moment. The Moment is an edge, an opening from normal time into timeless space, we might say into Heaven and Hell. In Kafka's sense, it is always with us or we are always in it, but we can rarely be aware of it. Sometimes, however, when we know the world and ourselves, we sense that at the horizon is a subtle, impossible "opening" into timelessness. At such times, we begin to understand Stendhal's expression that "Beauty is the promise of happiness." Sometimes we also experience the Moment in interpersonal relations, perhaps most clearly in erotic love. Nietzsche writes, "To every soul there belongs another world; for every soul, every other soul is an afterworld. Precisely between what is most similar, illusion lies most beautifully; for the smallest cleft is the hardest to bridge"(44). Again and again, we try to speak of the same experience of being and becoming, but our language points up the differences rather than the similarities between, say, love and creative thought. As C. S. Lewis stresses in The Four Loves, our relationships with others cannot be based entirely on Eros. The formulations of this paper can help us in understanding the way in which we are separate and the way in which we are together. We are separate bodies but we live our lives in the same world. The desire to be completely one with the world can lead to suicide; the tendency to separate ourselves from the world leads to isolation, another form of dying. Nietzsche had a conception of love different from the idea that humans can merge their personalities; his insistence upon individual autonomy is the best check against the above-mentioned totalitarian tendencies. He expressed his conception of friendship as follows: "I and me are always too deep in conversation: how could one stand that if there were no friend? For the hermit the friend is always the third person: the third is the 'cork' that prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depths"(45). This conscious detachment from others, however, does not preclude love, and is perhaps the most responsible form of love. Says Zarathustra, "Indeed, a lake is within me, solitary and self-sufficient; but the river of my love carries it along, down to the sea"(46). Because men have separate bodies, it is impossible that they should ever completely overcome their isolation. Man cannot ever replace the God who is either intuited or imagined from our faint experiences of liberation. Nietzsche dismissed the whole matter of an omniscient God, and asked that we affirm both our possibilities and our natural limitations. He wrote, "even your best love is merely an ecstatic parable and a painful ardor. It is a torch that should light up higher paths for you"(47). Psychoanalysis has developed the notion that the Self can be best understood as a "community of selves"(48), as we might expect if we adopt the conception of world-self. If this is true, the possibilities for human community might be discovered through self-knowledge, just as the self might best be liberated in a human community. The stakes are then very high, as we are talking of the possibilities for men to live in peace. Fingarette describes the moment preceding 'satori', the Zen enlightenment, as "a moment of uneasiness, despair, death. At this point, by 'letting go,' the disciple is awakened as from a stupor"(49). Again, we need to come to terms with dying if we are to live fully. Zarathustra says, "Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself. And your way leads past yourself and your seven devils. You will be a heretic to yourself and a witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and a villain. You must wish to consume yourself in your own flame: how could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes!"(50) In the previous section I briefly mentioned madness. In this section we have been discussing sanity. Sanity is definitely not normalcy in today's society, and it has nothing to do with the restricting of the mind until one can function with relatively little friction (although perhaps with a great deal of fear) in society. "True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self completely adjusted to our alienated social reality; the emergence of the 'inner' archetypal mediators of divine power, and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer"(51). "Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a barrier"(52). Between a man and an overman there is necessarily a barrier, and only a few "philosophers, artists, and saints" have begun to chart the way across. But on the other hand, every human being was conceived and born, and it may be possible to remember and re-enact that terrible, miraculous separation. And every human being was once a child. We may still find meaning in Nietzsche's parable of the overman's progress from the load-bearing camel, to the autonomous lion, to the child. Zarathustra helps to show the way by which we must break our chains, become self-sufficient adults, and rediscover wonder and beauty in the world.Notes
1. Nietzsche, Friedrich, "Ecce Home", The Philosophy of Nietzsche, Random House, New York, p. 105. 2. Mann, Thomas, "Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events", Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., 1947. 3. Nietzsche, Friedrich, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", The Portable Nietzsche, The Viking Press, New York, 1964. 4. Ibid., p.250. 5. Ibid., p.242. 6. Ibid., p.278. 7. Ibid., p.244. 8. Jung, Carl, Psychological Reflections, Harper & Row, New York, 1961, p.22. 9. Laing, R.D., The Politics of Experience, Random House, New York, 1967, p.48. 10, Fingarette, Herbert The Self in Transformation Harper & Row, New York, 1963, p.33. 11. Baudelaire, Charles, "The Cat", The Flowers of Evil, The New Directions Publishing Corporation, New York, 1955, p.53. 12. Fingarette, op. cit,, p, 320. 13. Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", op. cit., p.146. 14. Lauer, Quentin, Phenomenology: Its Genesis and Prospect, Harper.& Row, New York, 1965, p.7. 15. Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke 'Zarathustra", op. cit., p.135. 16. Laing, op. cit., p.6. 17. Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", op. cit., p.166. 18. Ibid., p.189. 19. Ibid., p. 187. 20. Lauer, op. cit., p.2. 21. Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", op. cit., p.128. 22, Nietzsche, "Ecce Homo", op. cit., p. 94. 23. Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", op. cit., p.250. 24. Ibid., p.296. 25. Ibid., p.329. 26. Ibid., p.129. 27. Fingarette, op. cit., p.73. 28. Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", op. cit., p.256. 29. Ibid., p.254. 30. Ibid., p.274. 31. Ibid., p.313. 32. Laing, op. cit., p.93. 33. Kafka, Franz, Parables and Paradoxes, Schocken Books, New York, 1966, p.189. 34. Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", op. cit., p.198. 35. Lavrin, Janko, Nietzsche and Modern Consciousness, W. Collins & Company, London, 1922, p.5. 36. Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", op. cit., p.223. 37. Ibid., p.295. 38. Fingarette, op. cit., p.262. 39. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Three Short Novels of Dostoyevsky, Doubleday & Company, Garden City, 1960, p.182. 40. Kafka, op. cit., p.29. 41. Fingarette, op. cit., p.206. 42. Ibid., p.212. 43. Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", op. cit., p.269. 44. Ibid., p.329. 45. Ibid., p.167. 46. Ibid., p.196. 47. Ibid., p.183. 48. Fingarette, op. cit., p.181. 49. Ibid., p.329. 50. Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", op. cit., p.176. 51. Laing, op. cit., p.101. 52. Fingarette, op. cit., p.222.Bibliography
Charles Baudelaire, "The Cat", trans, Roy Campbell, The Flowers of Evil. ed. Marthiel and Jackson Mathews, New Directions Publishing Corporation, New York, 1955. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "Notes from the Underground", trans, Constance Garnett, Three Short Novels of Dostoyevsky, ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Doubleday & Company, Garden City, 1960. Herbert Fingarette, The Self in Transformation, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and the Life of the Spirit, Harper & Row, New York, 1963. R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche, The Man and his Philosophy, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1965. Carl G. Jung, Psychological Reflections, Harper & Row, New York, 1961. Franz Kafka, "My Destination", trans. Eithne Wilkins, "Paradise" trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, Parables and Paradoxes, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, Schocken Books, New York, 1966. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, The World Publishing Company, Cleveland, 1966. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, Random House, New York, 1967. Quentin Lauer, Phenomenology: Its Genesis and Prospect, Harper & Row, New York, 1965. Janko Lavrin, Nietzsche and Modern Consciousness, A Psycho-Critical Study, W. Collins & Company, London, 1922. Thomas Mann, "Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events", Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., 1947. George A. Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, Harper & Row, New York, 1965. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Ecce Home", trans. Thomas Common, The Philosophy of Nietzsche, Random House, New York. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", trans. Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann, The Viking Press, New York, 1964.Appendix
The Unknown God Once again, before I go on sending my glance into the future, I lift my clasped hands upwards to You, to You I flee, I in a deepening bond consecrated on the solemn altar, that always sounds again with your Voice. There deeply glowing are written the words: the Unknown God. Being am I, from the bloody sacrilege even to the present hour: being am I - and I sense the noose, from which I struggle to get out from which...I fled, yet which compels me to your service. Unknowable, I shall know you, who deep in my captive soul, range through my life like a storm, you Undoer, my relative! I shall know You, which is to serve You. -Friedrich Nietzsche- translated by D. Ohmans To the Glacier At noon, when first summer in the mountains begins, the youth with weary, burning eyes: then he too speaks, we hear only his speaking. His breath catches, like a sick man's breath catches during a fever. There is an ice-field and a fir and a spring to answer him, we hear only their answer, downward from the rocks plunges the brook like a greeting as white quivering columns freezing their longing. The firs look darker and more real than they looked, and between the ice and dead gray rocks sudden light breaks out-- I saw such light before: thus we interpret it. - Also a dead man's eyes will once again show light, when his grieving child is his embrace and kiss: once more grief kindles the flame of light, luminiscent speak the dead eyes: "Child! o child, you know, that I love you!" - Glowing thus all things speak -ice-field and fir and spring- they appear as the same words: "We love you! o child, you know, we love, love you!" And he, the youth with weary, burning eyes, he kissed them with his grief, his constant ardor and would not leave; he cast his words like a veil over his mouth, his bitter words: "My greeting is farewell, my coming is my going, I die young." It hears him struggle and barely breathe: no bird sings. Then overcome it shudders, like a chimera, the mountain. It thinks his struggle - and is silent-- It was at noon, at noon, when first summer in the mountains begins, the youth with weary, burning eyes. -Friedrich Nietzsche- translated by D. Ohmans To Malwida von Meysenbug Does nothing of Sorrento's fragrance still remain? Is everything mountainous, frigid and wild, beneath autumn sun-rays loveless disdain? Part of me to beech forests still is beguiled: at your altar, I present this better part to friend, mother and physician, which thou art. -Friedrich Nietzsche- translated by D. Ohmans The Autumn This is the autumn: which - breaks the heart! Be gone! be gone! The sun sneaks to the mountain climbs and climbs resting at each step. What wilted the world! Playing on frayed stretched strings the wind makes song. Hope disappeared - it went its way. This is the autumn: which - breaks the heart! Be gone! be gone! O fruit on the trees, you tremble, do you fall? When a secret is told you at night, that shivers your cheeks and turns them purple? - You are silent, don't you answer? Who still speaks? -- This is the autumn: which - breaks the heart! Be gone! be gone! "I am not beautiful" -says the sunflower- , "yet I love man and I comfort man - he still should need flowers, so he bends over ah! and breaks me off - in his eyes glistens remembrance, memories of more beautiful flowers: - - I see that, I see that - and thus die!" - This is the autumn: which - breaks the heart! Be gone! be gone! -Friedrich Nietzsche- translated by D. Ohmans On the Third Skin As soon as I bend down to break your skin, I am filled with new urges, so many have already digested the earth, toward the earth I tend like the snake. Already I crawl between stone and grass hungry along crooked furrows, to eat that, which always I ate, you food for serpents, you earth. -Friedrich Nietzsche- translated by D. Ohmans